The choice to use the notion of “ecosystem” instead of “ecology” pushes towards a new way of thinking about these environmental matters, that would be wider and all-embracing: scientific, aesthetic and socio-economic.​ During this conference, scholars, artists and students will be reunited in order to share different perspectives, to gather the current works and thoughts from various backgrounds.​ Thus, the different panels will also address topics such as colonisation, ongoing wars, queer studies, and other issues that, at first, seem to be distant from environmental causes, as we can see through Ewa Bal’s intervention (“Queering war in collective theatre practices in the face of the Russian attack on Ukraine”, on the 31th of October).​ Ecology as we are used know is also covered in panels such as “Climate change stories on stage. A crisis of imagination” by Rossella Menna, but it is not limited to the need for a greener world: that’s why the word “ecosystem” is privileged. It puts forwards the notion of community, and the intersections with other social combats.

This broad concept of  “ecosystem” is the starting point for our experience as the micro-ecosystem of the Observatoire critique, a group of people from all over the world, with a big diversity of backgrounds and artistic practices that creates a mixture of viewpoints. The observatoire 2024 is seventeen people made up of fourteen different nationalities. We are the largest and most diverse group of artists and scholars to date. Our ecosystem brings perspectives from performance, theory, writing, puppetry, fine art, scenography, poetry, directing, dramaturgy, devising, music, dance, artificial intelligence, circus. Our function is to archive the conference digitally and physically as it happens.